Jesus, the Message of the Prophets

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We’re going to be in John chapter 1 this morning. John chapter 1, as we’ve been looking at it for several weeks now. You know, I used to have a great memory until I had children.

And I blame them. I blame them because I used to have a mind like a steel trap, and now I can’t remember things that were said to me 10 minutes ago unless I write it down. And then half the time I lose the paper.

It drives my wife a little bit crazy, but she’ll say things to me, and I feel like you don’t listen. I listen. There’s just so much, and it’s hard to remember so much that’s said to me.

And she’ll send me the store for something, and I don’t get the one thing she sent. Last night, we were watching a documentary on the brain, and how the brain plays tricks on you, and how the brain works. And there’s this spot in the brain called the hippocampus that determines what gets filed away in long-term memory.

And I paused the TV and I looked at her and I said, see, you can’t get mad at me. Blame it on the hippopotamus. And she looked at me and said, it’s called the hippocampus.

And I said, yeah, and if it worked, I would remember that. It doesn’t always work. I don’t always, things don’t always get filed into that long-term memory.

And it shows up all the time, as I said, when she’ll send me to the store. She’ll send me to Walmart. I don’t know how bad I’ve been that she sends me to Walmart in December.

But anyway, she’ll send me to Walmart and ask, you know, can you go get this for me? It’ll be something like frozen corn or cream cheese. Can you go get this one item?

And I’ll say, sure, you know, whatever, whatever to help you out. And plus, oh, I needed a couple things also. And so I’ll go wander around Walmart for 30 minutes, and I’ll come back with salad stuff, and I’ll come back with hinges from the hardware area.

I’ll come back having looked at light bulbs for the Christmas stuff. I might go over to Fabric and see if they’ve got. .

. And I’ll come home with everything but the cream cheese or the frozen corn. And we laugh about that, but it’s infuriating to me when I have to go back then.

Or at that point she says, I’ll just do it myself and go down to Cash Saver. That probably would have been a wise call to begin with. But it’s irritating because that was the whole reason for the trip.

All of that other stuff that I needed could have waited. I only was going there because of the things that she asked me for and needed right then. the corn and the cream cheese were the reason for the trip.

The reason for the whole trip, everything else was incidental. They were not just other things on the list. Do you understand this? They were the reason for the whole thing. And yet I forgot because in my mind, in all the swirling, oh, maybe I need this, maybe I need that, I failed to see the importance of those as they are the reason for me being in this awful, awful place.

They are the reason. we do the same thing when it comes to our view of Scripture or with our view of history. We look at the coming of Christ as though it’s just another Bible story in the list of Bible stories.

And as Christians, as people who believe that the Bible is literal history, we may even look at it and say it’s just another event in history. And we file it away, you know, the same level, maybe a little more important, but it’s on the same level as, you know, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. It’s on the same level as the invention of the printing press.

It’s another event in history. And what we fail to realize is that the coming of Christ is not just another story in the Bible. It’s the reason for all the stories in the Bible.

There’s no point to any of them if it hadn’t been for the coming of Christ. Everything in the Bible points to the coming of Christ. The coming of Christ is not just an accident of history. As it says in your notes, if you’re following along, it’s not just an accident of history. It’s not just one more event that took place in history.

It is the reason for history. It’s not just one more event in history. It is the reason for history.

It’s not a coincidence that our entire way of dividing up time is before Christ and Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. Now, I think that the year that they dated Christ’s coming was off by about five, six years, somewhere in there. But the point is they were trying to divide history right there at his birth because his coming is the central fact of history.

Everything that God said, as we’re going to see this morning, everything that God said and did throughout the Old Testament was pointing people to the fact of Jesus coming. Even 4,000 years before, in the Garden of Eden, as we’ll talk about in a few minutes, he was pointing people forward to the fact that he was going to send Jesus Christ. And everything in the New Testament is pointing back to the fact that he came. So it’s sort of the focal point.

There are those focal points in your life that you’ll never forget. For some of you, it may be the Kennedy assassination. My dad can tell you where he was when he heard Kennedy was shot.

My mother was like three months old at the time, so she can’t really tell you. She was in California. That’s what she knows.

I wasn’t anywhere when Kennedy was shot, so that means nothing to me. But there are other things that I remember. I remember vividly the Oklahoma City bombing.

I remember vividly 9-11. You know, there are some things that stand out, and they are focal points. And the world was so changed before and after.

It was so different after from what it was before that you see the world differently. It divides time for us. Even more than we can look back and say, well, everything was like this before Kennedy was shot, and then everything was different afterwards.

Or everything was like this before 9-11. and now everything’s different afterwards. We can look at those little focal points in history and it gives us a little glimmer of what the coming of Christ is like.

Because everything is different. Our whole way of relating to God as human beings is different. Our whole way of living on the basis of what are we going to do to make God happy?

Whether we keep the sacrifices and the rituals and all that or whether we walk by faith, it’s all different before his coming versus after his coming. Everything changed. The world, ladies and gentlemen, even changed.

Not just for individuals, nations changed. Now I submit to you that the Roman Empire and the Western world were never fully Christianized. And we look and say, oh, the Christian Roman Empire, those people never bought into all the teachings of Jesus Christ. Never bought into all of them.

The British Empire was never entirely based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Even America, which was heavily influenced by Christianity, was never fully Christianized. The country, the society, was never fully based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, or we’d treat each other a lot differently. But nations that before had acted one way and they’d treated human life one way were completely different afterwards.

Slavery ended in the Roman Empire because of the coming of Christ. It took a few hundred years, but it ended because of the coming of Christ. The way they treated their children, the way they treated their women, it all changed because of the coming of Christ. The world changed. His coming is the focal point of history. And we see that because you look back at the Old Testament and everything in there points forward to His coming, to this cataclysmic event that would change everything.

And we see this in John chapter 1. Now, we’ve been reading through this the last few weeks, and this morning we’re going to focus in on verses 6 through 8, but just to keep up with context here, we’re going to start in verse 1. It says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. And those first three verses identify Jesus Christ as being one with God and being along with God the Father, the creator of the entire universe.

He’s not just some baby that started at Bethlehem and then became a powerful individual. He existed long before Bethlehem. He existed long before creation because he has no beginning. He is God, and he’s the creator of all things.

Then we move in starting in verse 4, verses 4 and 5, and we see him being the redeemer. We see him being the to come and give life to that creation that he made. It says, In him was life, verse 4, and the life was the light of men.

And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. And the same came to bear witness of the light.

The verses, verses 4 and 5, talk about him giving life and light to the world that he created, even after it had become so marred and so darkened by sin. And I told you last week that I’ve been teaching this verse wrong for several years. That I thought that word comprehended meant in this context, the darkness and the light were so different they couldn’t even understand one another.

But that word comprehended in the context that is used here, the way this Greek word is used throughout the New Testament, I believe it means the darkness could not conquer the light. That Jesus Christ came with such powerful light into the world that there’s nothing the darkness could do about it. We move on in verse 6.

It says, there was a man sent from God whose name was John. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the light that all men through him might believe. He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light.

Okay, so we look at these few verses and they talk about John. So we’ve switched from, we’re talking about the word, which is Jesus, to all of a sudden, John is in here. Now don’t be confused just because it’s in the book of John.

The apostle John is not writing about himself. A lot of times he didn’t even name himself. He would be the disciple that Jesus loved.

And I’m not sure if that’s modesty or bragging there. I don’t even have an identity. I’m just the one Jesus loved.

That could be humility or I’m the one Jesus loved. You know, when I tease my sister about, we really know I’m mom’s favorite, which I know she is, but I like to give her a hard time. I don’t know if it’s humility or what, but John often identified himself as the disciple Jesus loved.

Here he’s talking about John the Baptist, who was the cousin of Jesus Christ, and who came, as we know from other accounts in the Gospels, to prepare the way of Jesus’ coming. And it says there was a man sent from God, whose name was John. His coming was the fulfillment of prophecies that were spelled out in Isaiah chapter 40 and Malachi chapter 5.

Isaiah talked about the voice of one crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord. The one who would come and prepare the people for the Messiah. Somebody had to come and get the people ready.

And in Malachi, it talks about somebody coming back in the spirit of Elijah. And John the Baptist came in the spirit of Elijah and confronted the sin of the people to turn the hearts of the people back to God. And we see through the gospel accounts that that’s exactly what he did.

He came preaching repentance to the people, and he had them baptized as a symbol of their repentance. He came and preached to people that they needed to really soften their hearts toward God and focus on what God was doing, and to prepare themselves because God was about to send the Messiah. God was about to send the Savior who had promised all throughout the Old Testament.

And so John came and did this, and he attracted a following. He preached against the self-righteousness of the people. He preached against the hard-heartedness of the people, and he called them to repent.

And when they responded and repented, he baptized them. And because of his ministry, the people were more sensitive to the work of God than they would have been otherwise. People were more alert to godly things.

Sometimes those things happen that make us more alert to godly things. Christmas is coming. and more people will be focused on Jesus in this month who would not give him a second thought all throughout the rest of the year.

Because this season, for whatever reason, makes people more attentive to spiritual things. I remember after 9-11, the first few weeks, how full the churches were. I don’t know if it was the same thing here.

But we were attending First Southern Baptist of Dell City at the time. And that’s already a huge church, thousands of people every Sunday. But it was packed in the weeks after 9-11.

Because something came that made people more attentive to spiritual things. Made people seek God. And that’s what John’s ministry did.

It made people more attentive to spiritual things. Prepared them to hear the message that the Messiah would bring. And he came as a witness, it says in verse 7.

He came for a witness to bear witness of the light. His ministry prepared people not just to focus on God, but prepared them for the coming of the Messiah. He said, hey, you’ve got to listen to what God has been saying.

You’ve got to listen to what God’s been telling you for thousands of years, not only about how to live and how to follow him, but about this Messiah that he’s sending because the time is close. There was an urgency in John’s message about you’ve got to repent because the time is drawing very close when God is going to send the Messiah. And when Jesus came on the scene, John identified him as the Messiah.

He told his followers, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. There he is, right there. The guy that God’s been talking about for 4,000 years, he’s right there.

He pointed people to light. John’s message was never really about himself. It was about pointing people to Jesus.

It was about Jesus being the fulfillment of all these things in the Old Testament. It was about Jesus finally coming to keep all the promises that God had been making to them for 4,000 years. And it says in verse 6 here, He did this that all men through Him might believe.

He was pointing His followers to Jesus Christ, not so they would know, oh, hey, there’s the Messiah. Well, good, we know who it is. No, it wasn’t just a knowing thing.

He wanted them to believe. He wanted them to believe in Jesus. He wanted them to recognize him as the Messiah.

And so that through him as the Messiah that they could draw near to God. And so his whole ministry was about pointing people to Jesus. Even before he was sure that Jesus was the Messiah, his ministry was about pointing people to the Messiah.

And then once he knew Jesus was the Messiah, it became all about pointing people to Jesus he was not that light verse 8 but was sent to bear witness of that light again John here John repeats himself a little bit to make sure we understand that he knows what he’s saying and he really means what he said and what we heard he was the first to admit John was the first to admit he was not the Messiah himself some of the Pharisees approached him and said are you the Messiah are you Elijah are you one of the everything he pointed them back to Jesus He said, I’m not him. In every case, in every case, just like we should do, in every case, he reflected all the glory, all the praise, all the credit, all the attention back to Jesus. And John was just, he wasn’t the first one to point to Jesus.

He was the last in a long, not the last to point people to Jesus, but he was the last in a long line of prophets who pointed to Jesus. See, this wasn’t the first time, as I’ve already alluded to, this wasn’t the first time that God sent somebody to prepare the people for the coming of the Messiah. He was just the last one before the coming of Christ. But this had been going on for centuries.

This had been going on for millennia. And I’ve given you a list here. I’m not going to spend a great deal of time talking about any one of these, so please don’t panic when you look and see there’s a front and a back to the sermon notes today and 15 sub points.

These are mainly for me to mention and go on and for you to go do your own study on later on if you’re so inclined to make sure I’m telling you the truth. But I wanted to list out some of these so you could see. There are pictures of Jesus all throughout the Old Testament.

And as far as pictures of Jesus, I only picked out a few highlights from Genesis and Exodus. We could go all the way through the Old Testament, and they’re there. I only picked out a handful of prophecies, but they’re all throughout there.

But we’re going to look at a few this morning. There are pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament. He’s the one who would defeat Satan.

he’s the one who would defeat Satan when it said in Genesis chapter 3 when God said to the serpent that you’ll bruise his heel and he’ll crush your head and Jesus is the one who crushed Satan’s head and got his heel bruised in the process not literally his heel but Jesus is the one who was wounded in the process of destroying Satan and his plans so there’s a picture when God the Father is talking to the serpent in the Garden of Eden about what you just did leading them astray. He was already pointing to Jesus. A few verses later in verse 21, he’s the innocent one who would die for the sins of the guilty.

He’s the innocent one who would die for the sins of the guilty. I believe that when God killed the animal to make a coat of skins to cover Adam and Eve because the fig leaves just weren’t cutting it. When that animal gave its life, I believe that was a picture of Jesus Christ. And we notice, too, that as we see the pictures and the prophecies, They get a little clearer as time goes on.

God starts out with just baby steps of information and then works them up to it. It’s sort of like starting us out with strained carrots, or actually with formula. And then we get strained carrots and mashed potatoes, and then maybe we can eat a few real things like crackers.

And then we have to work our way up to eating things like steak and caramel apples, things that take real chug. As far as their understanding of God and His will, that’s really how He worked. He started them out with just a little bit at a time and worked His way up.

He was the refuge from God’s wrath against sin. I believe that the ark is a picture of Jesus Christ. And Peter sort of refers back to the ark and talking about salvation, Noah’s ark and talking about salvation. God’s wrath was poured out on sin.

It was literally poured out on sin in the form of a flood. And there were eight people who were kept alive because they ran to that ark for shelter. They found refuge in the one place that God had made available for refuge.

It was the perfect sacrifice for sin. I said before, it’s no accident that when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son because God asked him to, that Abraham looks up and God stops him from plunging the knife into his son, and Abraham looks up and there’s a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. I don’t believe that was an accident or a coincidence.

I think rams are pretty tough animals, at least as far as sheep go. They’re tougher than your average sheep. And to be caught in a few thorns, I would think it could just yank itself out.

And even if it wasn’t strong enough to yank itself out, how did that ram show up at just that moment? That was God providing a perfect sacrifice. God’s saying, no, no, no, you’re not going to die as a sacrifice, Isaac.

Isaac wouldn’t work as a sacrifice. I will provide the sacrifice. You and I could have died and been punished for our sins in hell, and that wouldn’t accomplish anything.

We’d never pay off our sins. And so God said, I will provide the sacrifice. So I believe the ram on Mount Moriah there was a picture of Jesus.

It’s a foreshadowing of Jesus as they taught us in literature classes. He’s the blessing of all nations through Abraham’s lineage. When God said, and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thou hast obeyed my voice.

It’s through Abraham’s lineage, through the Jewish people, that God brought Jesus to earth as the Messiah. And his life and his death and his burial and his resurrection have been a blessing to people of all nations who have received him by faith and found salvation. So when God talked to Abraham about a blessing to all nations, he was talking about Jesus.

He was the one who suffered to save his brothers. Now, literally, that was Joseph. But I think in the life of Joseph, We see a picture of Jesus.

We see someone who was cast into prison, someone who was beaten, someone who was falsely accused, someone who suffered things he did not deserve, all so that he could rescue those who really deserved what he got. It was the spotless Passover lamb when God told Moses to have the Israelites slay a lamb and paint the blood over their door frames and hide in their houses, hide under the protection of the blood and consume that lamb While the angel of death passed through, leading out God’s sentence on the wicked nation of Egypt. It’s a picture of Jesus.

Because we ourselves are hidden from the wrath of God under the blood of Jesus. And his wrath passes over us when he sees the blood. He’s the smitten rock that issues out the water of life.

When Moses and the children of Israel were wandering in the wilderness and there was no water. And they were all saying, we’re going to die, we’re going to die. I don’t know why they always said, oh, God, you brought us here to die in the wilderness.

I read that, and I just want to say, shut up, which I’d probably be like them as well, but I just think, shut up. Has he not met every single other need that you have? Do you really think he brought you here to die?

Anyway, it’s just irritating. But one of those, except I would do the same thing. I do the same thing.

In one of those circumstances, they were worried they were going to die of thirst. And so God sends Moses out with his staff to smite a rock. The Bible talks about Jesus being the rock of our salvation, and him being smitten, him being bruised for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. The Bible talks about him as the source of living water.

And I believe that when Moses struck the rock, and was supposed to go back again and just speak to the rock, but he struck it again and God got angry with him. That was supposed to be a picture of Jesus. The rock that was smitten once to save us, to issue forth living water.

Jesus Christ was sacrificed once for all. He was smitten and slain once for all. We don’t have to sacrifice him again over and over and over for our sins.

Once was enough. He’s the Sabbath rest from our labors. The book of Hebrews talks about him being our Sabbath rest. And when God set that up, that wasn’t meant to be a rule to make our lives difficult.

Hey, you can’t do anything this day. You have to observe all these rules. It was meant to be a rest for us.

And it was meant to be a picture of resting from our labors in Jesus Christ. That we could strive and strive and strive after the law. Or we could rest in Jesus Christ, our personal Sabbath rest. And then on top of that, there are some, not just pictures. All these that I’ve talked about before have been pictures of Jesus.

things that we might not pick up on until afterwards where you see the end of it and you go, oh, that makes sense. But there were prophecies too where God’s saying, here, just so you don’t mistake it, I’m talking about the Messiah here. He’d be born of a virgin.

Isaiah 7. 14, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, meaning God with us. So a virgin would give birth and bear a son and he would be God with us.

I talk about this all the time. Some more liberal churches like to claim, well, that’s not the virgin birth. I guess they feel like they’re too smart to believe in the virgin birth.

I like to think I’m pretty smart, but I’m not too smart to believe in what God said. That word there, al-mach in Hebrew, can mean young girl, which is the way, I believe it’s the Revised Standard Version translated it. And a lot of liberal churches bought into that and said, well, it’s just a young girl.

That’s the sign of Messiah. A young girl would give birth. But if you notice, if you go back and look at it for yourself, it says, therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign.

In other words, here’s the flashing neon sign that will lead you to the Messiah. A young girl will give birth. Usually it is young people who give birth, right?

I mean, you don’t have many people on Medicare going to the maternity ward, right? I’m sorry, I heard, ooh, I hope that didn’t put images in here. It usually is a young woman.

How is that a sign of anything? On the other hand, a virgin gives birth. That doesn’t happen every day.

I’d say that’s a sign. So he’d be born of a virgin. And we know from the fulfillment in the New Testament that Jesus was born of a virgin.

He would be born in Bethlehem. Micah chapter 5 says, But thou, Bethlehem, Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth have been from old, from everlasting. the next great ruler of Israel would come from Bethlehem.

Now this is after David, so it’s not a prophecy about David. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. They were supposed to be looking for the Messiah in Bethlehem.

He entered Jerusalem triumphantly. You remember the story from when you were kids? We don’t talk about it much anymore in big church, but I remember the story a lot from when I was a kid of him riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with a donkey and then waving palm fronds and yelling, Hosanna, Hosanna.

I remember one year we even made palm fronds out of paper plates. I thought that was so much fun. That happened, but it was foretold several hundred years before that the Messiah would do that.

It wasn’t an accident that he rode into town on a donkey. Zechariah says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem.

Behold, my king cometh unto thee. He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding upon a donkey, and upon the colt, the foal of a donkey. he would come into Jerusalem triumphantly riding on a donkey he was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver y’all remember the story Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver that was foretold that the Messiah would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver in the book of Zechariah you can go read it for yourselves he was tormented and humiliated and there are all sorts of places in the Old Testament that talk about the suffering of the Messiah but Isaiah chapter 50 talks about him not being rebellious and how they would strike him and yet he would turn and allow them to strike him, how they would rip off his beard, but he wouldn’t try to hide his shame from them.

Jesus stood there and endured the humiliation for us. Read Isaiah chapter 53 sometime, by the way. I read an account of a pastor who grew up Jewish who said he thought Christianity was evil.

He started reading Isaiah 53 and realized that Jesus had to be the Jewish Messiah. Read it for yourself sometime. It just, it’s, man, it just is abundantly clear to me that God was foretelling the coming of Jesus.

He was crucified. He was crucified. Psalm 22 talks about His straight being gone, Him thirsting there on the cross, the dogs surrounding Him, the wicked surrounding Him, them piercing His hands and feet, and yet not a bone being broken.

It talks about his garments being stolen and being gambled for. It’s all there in Psalm chapter 22 that the Messiah would go through this on the cross. He paid for our sins.

This is from Isaiah 53 that I was talking about just a minute ago. Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions and he was bruised for our iniquities.

The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. Folks, the coming of Jesus is not an accident of history. It’s not just one more thing on the list that we can treat like the others and forget about.

It is the reason why everything else happened. Everything that happened before Jesus, God orchestrated to bring Jesus into the world and to point people to Jesus. And I believe the way the world has worked since then has been God orchestrating things or allowing things to happen that would draw people to Jesus.

He is the center point. He’s the focal point of history. That’s why he points out that John came.

It wasn’t to preach himself. It was to preach Jesus and to prepare the people for the coming of Jesus. And John was just the last in a long line of prophets that pointed people to Jesus.

His coming is the most important thing that has ever happened. God’s purpose throughout all of human history. God’s reason for everything happening has been for man to recognize Jesus, to believe in Jesus, and to be reconciled to God through Jesus.

That’s it. He didn’t come as a baby in a manger so that we could have pretty Christmas cards or a light-up display in my lawn where the bulbs keep burning out. He didn’t come so we could have nice stories to tell kids in children’s church.

He didn’t come so we could make palm farms out of paper plates. He didn’t come so we could make people feel bad about their sin. He came so that we would recognize Him, believe in Him, and be reconciled to God through Him.

Everything else in history is oriented to that fact.